“Many women tell me they want to have a man in their life, but they are no longer willing to be the only person giving in the relationship. They don’t want to be with a man who needs to be taken care of. In that case, it’s easier and more pleasant to be without a man.”
These words speak eerily to the current moment. Yet their date of publication? 1984.
You’ll find them in psychotherapist and acclaimed author Marjorie Hansen Shaevitz’s The Superwoman Syndrome, one of the earliest books to grapple with the superwoman myth – the idea that women can effortlessly balance work and family responsibilities in workplaces not designed to support them. And that any evidence of struggle is interpreted as a personal failing rather than a systemic one.
Despite its articulation of the burdens women face in the formal economy, its solutions to what is now called the the “second shift” involve telling women to make lists and prioritize their responsibilities. These, of course, are hardly the strategies that will move the needle in improving women’s daily lives.
Similar frustrations appear in another influential work from the same period. In a report written by feminist Shere Hite, published in 1987, most American women described feeling frustrated with their relationships.
Ninety-eight per cent reported wanting more verbal closeness with the men they loved: more sharing of thoughts, feelings and plans, and more reciprocal curiosity. Eighty-three per cent reported being the ones to initiate deep conversations with their partners, and 63 per cent reported being met with “great resistance” when trying to get their partner to talk about their feelings.
Though these findings were released decades ago, their relevance raises questions about how much has really changed for women.
The media-fuelled illusion of novelty
Both Hite’s report and Shaevitz’s book were published long before the term “heteropessimism” or the decentring men trend came into vogue. They came out long before any of us were considering where we fell on the “is having a boyfriend embarrassing?” debate. (My take? No relationship status should be slotted hierarchically above or below another).
Yet these publications capture the mood of contemporary heterosexual culture to a tee: women continue to be doing the most emotional, cognitive and unpaid housework and child-care labour, and women continue to be sick and tired of doing it.
News outlets today report on the “great divide” between men and women, particularly among younger generations. They discuss how women are turning to voluntary celibacy and/or rejecting heterosexual dating outright. They frame these trends and attitudes as out of the norm: for the first time, women are opening up about how they feel. But the truth is, these trends are normative and historically patterned.
It seems that women’s frustration – with the unpaid labour they are culturally expected to perform, with the men who won’t share in it, and with the social institutions that fail to support its redistribution – is the heartbeat of history. But it doesn’t need to be so.
Frustration keeps reproducing itself
Unlike what “tradwife” influencers will have you believe, working women are, on average, less depressed and have higher rates of self-esteem than stay-at-home mothers. Yet working mothers still face anxieties and role conflicts.
Where does this anxiety come from? Is it because women are “naturally” suited to the home and therefore ill-equipped for work in the formal economy, as tradwife influencers suggest? Or is it something else?
Looking at the problem from a sociological lens, it’s clear that anxiety results from the structures of paid work (which have not changed, despite women and the demographic composition of the workforce changing) and the distressing (and at times violent) contours of contemporary heterosexual culture, in which men continue to free-ride off women’s unpaid labour.
Anxieties also pervade as many governments fail to mandate paid parental and care leave, workplaces fail to offer family-friendly policies, and the ideology of individualism, in contrast to collectivism and communal care, remains dominant. Above all, anxiety is rife because cultural beliefs about gender, parenthood and work have remained stubbornly resistant to change.
Every few years, a flurry of news articles and social media posts lament women’s unpaid work and individual men are tasked with becoming equal helpers in the home. While individuals have their part to play in facilitating this cultural transformation, sociologists like myself are interested, too, in the role that social institutions, such as work, media and government, play in structuring individual lives.
Why hasn’t change happened yet?
We set ourselves up for failure when we hold individual men responsible but fail to provide them with cultural frameworks of masculinity that laud men’s contributions to housework and child care, and when we fail to vote for (or don’t have the option of voting for) governments that will introduce paid parental leave, regulate corporations to enhance worker power and fund community-building initiatives.
To be sure, frameworks and representations of caring masculinities do exist, but they’re not often shown in mainstream media. This is why the representation of communicative and consensual masculinities that reject male domination in television shows like Ted Lasso, Shrinking and Heated Rivalry matters. They demonstrate to men alternative modes of being, living and relating to others in our world today.
Representation matters, but so does concrete political transformations.
For too long, work and family have been treated as separate domains. Perhaps the solution lies in their convergence: a radical reimagining of how work and parenthood ought to look.
Potential strategies include disrupting gendered occupational segregation, raising the wages of feminized work, decreasing hours of paid work and building a normative definition of masculinity centred around care.
Otherwise, we’re bound to keep having the same conversations, year after year, decade after decade — like we have been.
Meaghan Furlano, PhD Student, Sociology, Western University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Expert Insight reflects the perspective and scholarly interest of Western faculty members and is not an articulation of official university policy on issues being addressed.
